From an obituary of choreographer Roland Petit, who died on Sunday, July 10, 2011—

"Ballerina roles had for more than a century been largely made on pale romantically suffering virgins or royal princesses; Petit’s women were liberated and exciting, modern and tangibly real— and yet archaic femmes fatales . Probably his most popular ballet worldwide is Le jeune homme et la mort , in which a young bloke lazing around in his room is visited by an enigmatic, seductive female— at the end of which brief encounter he hangs himself.

The young man’s role was seized upon by the great ballet stars of the next decades, Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov notable among them. As with Carmen, the role of La Mort, the death goddess, has been sought out by a pantheon of great ballerinas, in Paris, Russia and the US as well as in Europe." —Ismene Brown at theartsdesk.com

From the philosophy column "The Stone" in Saturday's online New York Times—